White henbane
Hyoscyamus albus
Family · Solanaceae · Can kill
Read this before the sheet
This plant, or one that resembles it, is dangerous. Identifying is not authorising: no app has the authority to tell you that you may eat or touch a plant.
Emergency
The sticky, foul-smelling plant of old walls and rubble, with dirty yellow flowers and a dark throat. It was a witches' plant and a medieval anaesthetic, and is poison in any home dose.
Walls and rocks · Town and roadside · Roadsides and waste ground · Dunes and sand
Also known ashenbane
How to tell it
Covered in sticky hairs, with an unpleasant smell you notice before touching it. Pale yellow funnel flowers with a dark centre. Lidded capsules, like small pots.
What it is confused with
No dangerous lookalikes known in the Iberian Peninsula.
What it is for
None
The same tropane alkaloids as thorn apple, with the same unpredictability. All the history of use it has is history, not a recipe.
Where it occurs
Each square is an area with recorded observations of this plant. The lighter background is the set of areas where any of the entries has been observed, and serves as a reference. Note what this is not: it is not where the plant lives, it is where people record it, so trails and towns always look fuller than the mountains. Data from GBIF.
Sources
Community
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Nothing appears here without a person reading it first. Contributions do not replace the entry or its warnings: until a botanist confirms, what is written above stands.